Last evening BJP general secretary Ram Madhav was under constant attack from the handles associated to the Congress and others for the interview to Mehdi Hasan on Al Jazeera. Amidst the different arguments made by different Twitter handles, increasing intolerance, rise in communal clashes since Narendra Modi came to power and the idea of RSS as a Hindu organisation seemed to dominate the atmosphere of dissent. This environment on social media was very similar to the situation created on the sets of Al Jazeera. However, if one were to back arguments with data and objective analysis, the atmosphere appeared lopsided in favour of blatantly wrong facts and figures that rolled out from one participant to the other.
According to the published reply to an unstarred question asked in the Lok Sabha over incidents of communal violence from 2012 to 2015, the year 2014 saw an unprecedented decline in cases of violence. There was a stark reduction of 22 per cent in incidents of communal clashes, a 29 per cent decline in cases of killing and 15 per cent decline in cases of injuries owing to communal violence in comparison with 2013.
However, in contrast to the hard numbers and facts, what found repeated mention in the debate, on the sets of Al Jazeera and beyond, and shockingly here in India, was an emotional pitch for incidents of award wapsi in the name of defending secularism and restoring democracy. The tweets and comments showed a hilarious mixture of memes bordering on propaganda and agenda-driven attempt to vitiate the notion of dissent.
Dissent is an intrinsic part of a healthy democracy. But it also comes with responsibilities. It comes with the expectation of justification if dissent is challenged. Dissent in a democracy is based on rational and logical argumentation backed by incidental evidences against high emotional rhetoric and/or good-in-their-own-right arguments.
It is extremely sad that the Opposition and the champions of democracy today border more on hysteria and less on logical facts.
For the viewers of the interview like me, the debate and its aftermath created a mixed sense of despondency, anger and at times intolerance for the utter lack of constructive opposition in the country today. One feels saddened by the complete lack of an informed debate, even within the country, on a lot of issues raised in the Al Jazeera interview.
Why is it that when one allows space to talk about ghar wapsi, there seems an absolute lack of a platform to discuss religious conversions at length? Why is there an utter silence in discussing uniform civil code amidst such rage on social media? Why is there a complete lack of consensus amidst the Indian intelligentsia in discussing issues of the Kashmiri pundits with as much vigour as that of Azad Kashmir when one discusses Jammu and Kashmir?
Why is it that one cries hoarse on the bias in certain media studios but remains silent on the almost staged interview on Al Jazeera where time and space given to raise issues of alleged attack on democracy and factually suspect data on rising intolerance was disproportionately high? And lastly, why as Indians, do we fail to protest against the waste of public money by an Opposition (read Congress) as small as a WhatsApp group by creating a din in the house?
It is unfortunate that in the age of social media, where information flows freely and internationally, we have allowed lies, misrepresentation and selective bias to trend but forgotten to quote facts and logic and failed to ask the most basic questions.
